Late last month, scores from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were released, and the results were not particularly good. Eighth graders performed slightly worse in both math and reading, compared to 2013’s NAEP results. Fourth graders also performed slightly worse in math, while their scores in reading remained roughly the same. The resulting flurry of commentary speculated on what caused the poor performance: Common Core? Transition to new assessments? The recession? Some said—and I agree—that it is too soon to really know what NAEP-ageddon 2015 means going forward, if anything at all.

What I’m more interested in are the 2015 results for students in 12th grade, which are slated to be released in 2016. Until this year, 4th and 8th graders had seen small but steady increases in their NAEP scores since 1990. Seniors’ scores, however, have been consistently stagnant. The last time 12th graders took the NAEP test, in 2013, their scores in math and reading remained unchanged from the 2009 assessment.

This trend for high school students goes back much further and is best illustrated by NAEP’s Long-Term Trend Assessment, first administered in the early 1970s. This is different from the main NAEP test discussed above, and the two are not directly comparable. They are conducted in different years, their content and scoring differs somewhat, and the long-term assessment tests students at ages 9, 13, and 17, rather than by grade level. But, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, it is “the most reliable instrument of change over time.”

In the long-term assessment results, both 9- and 13-year-olds have shown steady improvement since the early 1970s. Seventeen-year-olds, on the other hand, have had consistently flat scores, and in 2012 – the most recent testing year – their performance had no statistically significant difference from the first time the assessment was administered. Below is a screenshot from the 2012 NAEP report, “Trends in Academic Proress,” which highlights the difference:

There is an important caveat to these results: the rapidly shifting demographics of American students. While the share of white students taking the assessment in the early 1970s was over 80 percent, it dropped to around 70 percent during the 1990s. By 2012, the percentage was just above 50. Chad Aldeman, an Associate Partner at Bellwether Education Partners (full disclosure: Chad is a colleague), described how this impacts overall trends in a post earlier this year:

Because NAEP takes a representative sample, it’s also vulnerable to something called Simpson’s Paradox, a mathematical paradox in which the composition of a group can create a misleading overall trend. As the United States population has become more diverse, a representative sample picks up more and more minority students, who tend to score lower overall than white students. That tends to make our overall scores appear flat, even as all of the groups that make up the overall score improve markedly.

That analysis is accurate, as white, black, and Hispanic students have, for the most part, significantly improved their scores on the long-term assessments across all age groups over the past four decades. These improvements have been quite large among nine- and thirteen-year-olds, which is why the overall trend lines for those age groups still show small but significant improvement. And black and Hispanic students have also lessened the gap between their scores and those of their white peers, which is a great thing. But that doesn’t mean that a nationally representative sample is not important – it’s still a reflection of what our student body knows as a whole. And it’s concerning that the overall scores of high school students have remained flat despite the overall gains made by the younger student groups.

​It’s possible that rapid demographic changes could level off at some point, causing overall scores to begin rising steadily. However, I could’ve written that exact same sentence in the 80s, the 90s, or the early 2000s. Regardless of the shifting racial trends in our student body, the fact that our nearly-college-aged students’ performance as a whole has been stagnant for 40 years is a scary thought.Phillip Burgoyne-Allen is a policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners. Reach him via email or Twitter.

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MONICA GRAY is co-founder & president of DreamWakers, an edtech nonprofit. She writes on education innovation and poverty.

LYDIA HALL is a legislative aide in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she works on education, civil rights, and other issues. Lydia is interested in helping to bridge the gap between Capitol Hill and the classroom.

MOSES PALACIOS is an advocate for student rights and works as a Research Manager for the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) - a coalition of urban school districts across the nation. He writes on issues regarding the children of immigrants and students learning English as a second language. His views are his own and not representative of CGCS.

PATRICIA RUANE is aresearch associate at an education nonprofit. She is an editor of Recess. ​LESLIE WELSH is a high school social studies teacher in DC. She is an editor of Recess.